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By Kyra O’Reilly, FISCAL Technologies

The Purchase to Pay Network (PPN) have recently released the annual PPN survey, which includes some interesting insights into P2P today. One overarching theme ran throughout that got us thinking: Automation.

What’s important to us in P2P right now?

According to the 2023 PPN Survey, our common challenges centre on the constant improvement of our team performance. From measuring the right metrics to eradicating duplicate payments, to implementing new technology. It’s clear that process optimisation is key, and with it, automation.

In fact, 43% of survey respondents said that choosing the right technology is a main issue facing P2P. Furthermore, 47% cited implementing new technology. It’s clear that for many in finance, the focus is to keep up with emerging tools that can improve efficiency.

UK SOX-Lite – Your Questions Answered

UK SOX is the unofficial name given to new corporate governance reforms coming into place soon. The long-awaited overhaul is designed to help prevent scandals that beset companies such as Carillion and BHS. However, after a push-back from UK boardrooms, the current plans are a more watered down version of what had been proposed. In fact, more of a UK SOX “Lite.”

In conversation with PPN Award Winner, Lee Prosser, Accounts Payable Manager at Shared Services Connected Ltd

PPN: Can you tell us a little about your work with suppliers – I believe you’ve been instrumental in creating a smoother invoice and PO process. What did you do?

Lee Prosser: Yes, I took an improvement opportunity to complete my Six Sigma Green Belt qualification on non-transactional invoice queries. And from there I gathered data on Service Requests and identified our largest pain points. Which for us was No/Invalid PO invoice submissions. Once that had been identified, I made a point of contacting all our suppliers to educated them on the correct invoicing procedure and reminded them that the Home Office run a strict No PO, No Pay policy. And to be honest, the improvement benefits both SSCL and the suppliers. Fewer queries and double handling of transactions for us, prompt payment for them!

Chat GPT, you can’t escape it. Whenever something billed as transformative comes onto the market, there’s always a flurry of excitement around it – whether it’s the first iPhone launch, Google Maps, or if you’re in Reading, the opening of a new Wendy’s restaurant… But it doesn’t matter how much marketing you put behind a product, if it doesn’t live up to expectations, then the flurry quickly turns to tumbleweed.

When Open AI launched an early demo of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, social media lit up with tales about remarkable it was. Why? Because it worked. And because it was simple to use. Within five days it had over a million users. To begin with the use case seemed limited to article generation, and it probably still is best known for its human-like written “voice,” but it’s easy to see how that can be used in finance scenarios. Generative AI uses machine learning algorithms based on existing data to create new data, so finance teams could leverage that information for contracts and investor or supplier communications for example. For finance teams still mired in manual processes, with an abundance of paper in the room, ChatGPT may seem like an irrelevance. But that’s an assumption that’s probably misguided, and here’s why: